The Journal Project Marches Forward

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I haven't posted for awhile, but that doesn't mean I have been inactive. Indeed, the Journal Project is marching forward. I've completed all the preliminary analysis and have been working on drafting a book outline and filling in parts of the chapters as that is possible.

Here is my tentative title (and this is one I've settled on among what seems like hundreds that I have generated):

Interior Conversations:  Technology, Aesthetics, and Qualitative Research

How is that for a pithy label for the work?! 

I've actually been having many good conversations with colleagues about the tentative outline and this has been extremely generative.  In addition to pointing out new ways of understanding the concepts, they have directed me to processes that have helped me to develop the materials in new ways ("That's interesting.  Write a memo about it!").  I have also been directed to some very good books.  Mark Johnson's The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding arrived from Amazon.com this last week. 

Questions I am skating around include:  What is a technology?  How is a technology a thing?  How do things (and technologies) compose practice?  How are aesthetics part of understanding, designing, and practicing with things (and technologies)?  How are aesthetics part of motor activity or embodied?  How is technology/things embodied? 

A rich area for me has been thinking about the ways qualitative researchers react to and avoid use of qualitative research software and related technologies.  I am beginning to see how these reactions are also embedded within streams of thought in sociology and other disciplines.  It appears that reaction to technology is often a confused response to industrialization and its ills.

Finally writing about family, provides me with new insight into the ways in which I am a living example of the tension between aesthetic and technical views as they were simplified and magnified in my family of origin.  Back to thinking!